Massively^™

Earlier this week we had the chance to speak with Mr. Daniel James, the CEO and co-founder of Three Rings. Makers of successful online titles Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy, the company is well known for the quality of its work and the quirkiness of its GDC parties. They've been working on a third project, Whirled, for the better part of 2008 and it just launched into full live service earlier this week. We spoke with Mr. James about the whys and logic behind Whirled, about the power of user-created content, and the power of offering actual compensation for hard work and talent.

Read on below the cut for our talk with Mr. James, and a thorough exploration of a brand-new Whirled.

Whirled, an ambitious web/virtual world hybrid from Three Rings, launched into Beta early this year. We were incredibly impressed with the project even back then, bouncing pieces of tofu or not. From there the project has only grown by leaps and bounds, and word now comes down that Whirled has officially launched! The interactive web environment now offers a microtransactional system where you can make money directly from your content. You can make or play games, chat with a wide array of players, or just enjoy the numerous and creative rooms players have generated over the last eight months.

We had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Daniel James about the new vision of Whirled, and you'll be able to read that discussion tomorrow. For the time being, go check out Venturebeat's analysis of the project or (if you're so inclined) read upon the full press release below the cut. PS: If you play, we recommend Brawler Whirled or Corpse Craft. They're both fantastic!

Puzzle Pirates might not get as much love from Massively as a certain other pirate-themed MMO, but that doesn't mean we don't like the cuter side of being a privateer. Today's One Shots comes to us from Gaea, one of the newbie support staff at Puzzle Pirates. We see that she travels in style, with everything but the kitchen sink arranged on the deck of her ship. Gaea writes:

Ahoy! While I'm not technically a GM as we use the term Oceanmaster, it's
still pretty good. Behold as I answer support events, settle disputes, ban
evildoers, sail a ship, and stay looking good, all at the same time! Yarr!

Do you have a pimped out space in your MMO of choice as well? Elite gear or rare items of some kind? Send us your screenshots at oneshots AT massively DOT com. After all, there's no point in being pimp if you don't flaunt it. Just remember to give us a brief description of what we're seeing and show off a bit.

As some of you may remember, we recently sent out a call for different GMs to send along some of their favorite screenshots. The above screenshot was in response to that call, and comes to us from Ocean Master Eurydice. She helps players out in Three Rings' incredibly addictive, free-to-play game Puzzle Pirates! Here's what she had to say:

I'm a GM on Puzzle Pirates, although over here we call them Ocean Masters. I saw your call for GM pictures and got this OKd with a supervisor. (Always good to check first...) [This] is a screenshot of my first ship, called the Queen of Shadows. It was colorfully decorated a couple years ago for my birthday by wonderful co-workers -- on their off time! It is where I stand when on duty on the Midnight Ocean (a server). We stand on ships so that we can have quiet while we answer petitions, but we can pop off at a moment's notice and be with the players if we need to. As you may be able to make out from the faint messages in the lower left-hand corner, there are parts of the ship not pictured here that are so decorated that I can't walk around them.

That seems like it's definitely a fun place to work if your co-workers decide to pull silly pranks like crowding your ship full of flowers and blocking you from moving around too much! (You know, especially when you also have awesome GM-type powers and can just move the flowers around.) Are you a GM who would like to show off something fun from your game? Send those screens in to us here at oneshots AT massively.com, along with whatever you'd like to say about them. It's almost as much fun as a ship full of flowers.

It appears that Gaia's Craig Sherman thinks that World of Warcraft isn't a success when compared to the hundreds of millions of "willing-to-play" teenagers it hasn't managed to claim as subscribers. A ridiculous claim, as success is a relative term -- especially when comparing free-to-play titles with something like World of Warcraft. We're not saying that games like Maple Story or Puzzle Pirates aren't good, they're just a different breed of MMOs.

Maybe we should measure MMO success by degree of pop-culture status: Has Maple Story had commercials featuring William Shatner, Mr. T and Vern Troyer? Will Puzzle Pirates become a theatrical film anytime soon? No, but that doesn't make these games any less successful in their own right. Plus, that's a ridiculous way of measuring success. There's a lot of differences in these games, but one thing is for sure -- World of Warcraft is definitely a successful game.

Three Rings, the makers of Puzzle Pirates, has just gone live with the open beta of its browser-based, 2D social space, Whirled. Whirled has all the features that have become de rigeur for a virtual world these days: minigames, a personal page-embeddable room for your avatar, purchasable objects, and basic creation tools.

Also, how can you not love a VW where the default avatar is an adorable piece of tofu? Yes, tofu. And it dances. Expect a First Impressions post for Whirled in the near future, boogieing soy critters and all!

You hear it all the time, especially when pundits talk about Second Life: how our virtual worlds and MMOs will one day become so integrated with the World Wide Web that you'll be able to check your bank balance from World of Warcraft; you'll order books from within Everquest; you'll chat with AIM friends while still in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Sure, at first glance, it seems like a good, maybe even necessary. But think about it -- when you're playing your favorite game, do you really need to do any of those things? Isn't that the reason you play in the first place, to get away from other concerns?

When we're in Second Life, we're engaged with talking and playing with our SL friends. When cutting a swath of destruction through marauding bands of orcs in Lord of the Rings Online, we're miles away from worrying about what our stocks are doing. And just think of how much concentration Puzzle Pirates demands -- do you really want to dilute it with putting together an important email? What does greater Web integration mean to you?

There's an interesting counterpoint to the increasing amount of games following the traditional MMO mechanics layout. No, I'm not talking about space MMOs and the mechanics they follow. We covered those last week! I'm talking about the gradual seepage of puzzlers into the genre. It's a budding paradigm, and has both failings and virtues. Naturally, it's time to dissect them.

The Venture Beat site is reporting that Three Rings, the developer of the fantastic Puzzle Pirates and the unique microtransaction title Bang! Howdy!, landed a big chest of gold this past summer. I imagine the gold was given to them in the form of American currency, as the company negotiated for some $3.5 million in venture capital money. The site also notes that the company's unique virtual currency platform is enormously successful, with $4 million in revenue reported by the company for 2007.

Though the site's article on the investment is light on what that VC money will be used for, they do briefly discuss Three Rings' work on the Whirled platform: The success of [the virtual currency] model has helped propel the company to 30 employees and is planning its new social networking game world, Whirled, where users will be able to create their own avatars, games, rooms, music, and pets.

[Via Next Generation]

It's been said that the best things in life are free. Whoever said it probably didn't have MMOs in mind, but it's certainly true that there are many quality games out there that are completely free to download and play. Here's a list of the top 5 free massively multiplayer online games.

Now, to pre-empt the equally massive glut of angry emails and comments I'm sure to receive for leaving someone's favorite title off of this list, I'm going to state right up front that these choices are based completely on the number of times I've heard them mentioned with favor by a variety of different sources. I make no guarantees of having played any of these MMOs, so they're not necessarily my personal picks. But if I keep hearing people mention them in different contexts, there must be something to them. In short, these games are popular for a reason, and if you haven't played them, you might find that they're worth your download. We begin after the jump!

Here's the latest in my exploration of Puzzle Pirates, as begun here and continued here. The Carpenting minigame looks at first glance like Tetris, the same way that the Bilging minigame looks like Bejeweled. This impression lasted for all of one minute after gameplay began, as pieces never fell, rows never disappeared, everything was the same color, and there wasn't even a hint of Slavic undertones to the music.

However, Carpenting does provide some serious anxiety, the way later levels of Tetris do. The full scoop, after the jump.

I've finally gotten around to checking out Puzzle Pirates. I love puzzles, I love pirates, I love the spaces between words; it's a match made in Heaven. So, I thought I'd share with you all my experiences. I began with the usual character creation, moved on to the Notice Board, and, as it was recommended, picked the Bilge minigame. It's for starters!

Bilgeing (if that's the correct term), is a lot like playing Bejeweled. In fact, it's so much like Bejeweled that I kept trying to play it like Bejeweled, and flailed around for a bit before I realized the main differences. 1) There is no vertical swap; it's all horizontal. 2) You want to clear top-to-bottom, rather than the reverse. In Bejeweled, clearing from the bottom cascades the jewels above you, typically resulting in jewel eliminations that you might not even have seen. Until I realized this in the Bilge minigame, I was missing a lot of elimination opportunities.

More after the jump!

How is it that I've never played Puzzle Pirates? Since its inception, folks around the 'Net have been extolling its virtues. Have I just been too busy? Too involved in making money, feeding my family, spending facetime with friends? What's wrong with me?

With this post, I'll be rectifying all that. I'll be starting up my new career with Puzzle Pirates and documenting it every step of the way with my impressions, accompanied by screenshots. While this may be old hat to some of you, perhaps it'll help the rest of you determine whether or not life on the high seas is worth your time. Avast, ye scurvy dogs! Strike the mainsails or I'll keelhaul the lot o' ye!